Cherries In The Snow (6 page)

When I can't write, I take a lot of baths. Although I have been on a roll at Grrrl – Junkie, Jet Lag, Jaundice for the purple, green, and yellow eye shadow trio; Applebum and Cherry Orchard for the new blushes – I can't write my novel, so I've been taking a lot of baths, two or three a day even when I spend eight hours at the office. I try to think of a different thing to do each time and space them out so that I feel I'm achieving each session. Soap. Exfoliate. Wash hair. Wearing red lipstick the whole time. I have no novel, but Isaac always said I have very soft skin, the softest of any girl he has been with. In the bath I write my novel, in my head. And it leaves as the water drains.

The weather hasn't helped my feelings of gloom. It's snowed a lot in March, which it really, really isn't supposed to do. I keep thinking the snow has ended and then getting caught. It starts and stops like the fourth day of your period. We have a full week without snow and then, on Wednesday, there comes this downpour that keeps kids out of school. Going to the Grrrl offices one March day, I'm wearing long white trousers, and by the time I get to work they're gray and soaked through to the top of my knees. Evidently the same had already happened to Holly and Ivy because when I walk in, they're walking about without their pants, just wearing matching Spiderman tops and knickers. Ivy's are boy-cut and
quite modest, but Holly's are a good two sizes too small. I love that she doesn't tug at them, lets 'em wedge where they want to and forgets about it. She is more comfortable with herself than any of us are.

Their corduroys are hung up over the radiator in our office. Vicki, who is sitting down at her desk, stands up to give me a hug hello, which seems more than a little grating once I realize I will be receiving it every single morning. I see that she too is without her lower garments. I take mine off and place them on the radiator in the conference room. Soon we are an entire workforce of half-dressed women. We look like a performance art installation.

Laid out on the conference table is an advertising mockup for a line we have coming out of tough-wearing nail polishes that will last through anything. It is of a female foot wearing a stiletto whose heel appears to be a weapon grinding into the bare torso of a man. Just visible through the toe of the pump are glossy black toenails.

Holly had me name the nail polishes after tough bitches: Ivana, Imelda, etc. I wanted to name them for art heroines – Gala, Arbus – and commission a young female artist to paint a series of miniatures using our polishes. Vicki said we should endorse inspirational women: Mia, Winona, Dido. Simpering idiots just like her. I'm surprised she didn't suggest the fucking Olsen twins. And, yes, I know they prefer to be called Mary-Kate and Ashley, but then billionaire blondes tend not to ignite the best in me. Vicki's just a poor blonde and I have a hard time not kicking her up the ass each time she speaks. If Holly wants to build the new marketing campaign on bitchiness instead of sex, why can't she just let us all be bitches in the office? Because we all are under the surface, each after our own agenda. But we have to sit under the sadomasochistic ad campaigns and act like feminism is our raison d'être. Funny
kind of feminism. But what do you expect from a company that makes its cash from telling women they should highlight what's wrong with them?

This communality is frustrating. Vicki keeps offering her opinion and we are all supposed to listen. Why? What are her qualifications? She wears lots of makeup. That is good enough for Holly and Ivy. And maybe they're right. They're the millionaires, not me. Born millionaires know how to make millions. It's frustrating. All I know are my father's mess of itemized bills and my mother's same old moans of ‘Why can't we take a holiday this Easter?' She insists on marking all the Christian dates on the calendar and all the British ones too – every bank holiday; May Day; Saint George's Day. Our holidays – Purim, Hanukkah, and Yom Kippur, yes, even the ones where you're supposed to fast – Dad and I just go get dinner together. Without her. We asked her to come, but she won't.

‘Fine,' she says, ‘enjoy yourself.' As my mum heads toward sixty, I often get the feeling she still has the voice of her anti-Semitic doctor dad in her head: ‘My baby girl with a Jew?' I'd judge her harder for it, but, you know, who can truly find peace when they know they've disappointed their daddy? Yet I can't be around that unhappiness. You can't choose your family. Occasionally people get lucky: Dad and I got it right, we are great friends. You know how some girls want to put couples together on the street: ‘You go with him.' ‘Ech, he's much too straight for you.' ‘She's too tall.' I want to put families together too. Send Vicki to live with Mum.

I sit at my desk in my turtleneck and knickers and try to think of a new way to market red lipstick. Vicki reminds me that people should think they have to buy all three, a set that can't be separated. Well, gee, thanks for that, Vicki. But she's right. They are basically all the same color and they each cost eighteen dollars. So I called one Chico, one Harpo, and one
Groucho. If you didn't see that the colors were all the same, you'd have to be one of those people who plays along with psychics: ‘Yes, I
do
know a dark-haired woman who may bear me ill will.' In my experience makeup junkies are the exact same people who pay to see psychics.

I feel a pang of guilt when I show the gals my suggestions for the new reds. They think the names are great.

‘But then it's easy, isn't it?' says Vicki.

‘It isn't easy,' I hiss, ‘it's art.' I haven't even worked there three months. Still, I scramble on with my theory: ‘Cherries in the Snow is Revlon's best-selling lipstick of all time. But it isn't the color that makes it. That's just another shade of red. It's the name. Cherries in the Snow? That's imagery worthy of a real writer. Truman Capote could have written that.'

‘Chico. Harpo. Groucho,' says Vicki, slow and spiteful, ‘that's Dostoyevsky.'

She pronounces it ‘dos-TOY-yefsky,' conjuring a wooden dreidel sold in a children's Judaica store. I hate her, I hate her, I hate her all over her body as if I were in love with her. It's bonkers, this seething; it's childish and useless. She's just a dumb girl, so what's the problem?

As soon as I met Vicki, with her blond halo of curls, I wanted my old hair back. Once the girls colored my hair, I never left the house without putting on red lipstick carved into my unrealistic bow. I lost weight because I didn't want to eat in case I messed up the lipstick. I remember as a kid how much I hated it when my room was touched, like I had lost control over the only thing I had. I feel like my face and what I do to it is all that I have control over.

Ivy turns on Vicki. ‘You shut up, fatty,' she gibes. Ivy calls everyone ‘fatty.' She is trying to reclaim the word
fat
from being an insult to being a compliment.

The row simmers down. Not much of a row, I know, but
hey, I'm not in a relationship right now so I take what I can get.

‘I need to take a slash,' says Holly. She has retained from her time in England only the most vulgar slang. Kitted out, today in earrings that dangle all the way down to her collarbone, she beckons me to the bathroom with her.

‘Give it to me,' she says, hand outstretched.

‘Give you what?'

She rolls her eyes. ‘Your cherries.'

I fish inside my bag and pull out the tube, which is getting pretty gnarly. She takes it from me, presses me up against the wall, and applies the lipstick to my mouth, not at all the way I do it. Four strokes exactly, half of my top lip, the other half, half of the bottom lip, and the final quarter. I can see, if I ever doubted it, how she is in bed: swift, confident, a little selfsatisfied. Then she applies it on herself, the same join-the-dots pattern, but I see it this time in slow motion, gasping as the color appears before me. She never wears lipstick that costs less than twenty dollars. She steps back and studies her work.

‘This is just red.'

She's asking me a question, but so cheap with language is Holly that she usually expects you to supply the question mark or the exclamation point in a sentence. The answer to her question is: ‘Kind of.' Yes, it's red. But that's just part of the story. I look at our mouths floating side by side in the mirror and I see Lauren Bacall in black and white, the deep gray on her elegant mouth somehow, undoubtedly, Cherries. I see a 1950s afternoon tryst, the first woman on the block to get divorced, the first to find herself. I see a girl who really loves a man's body rather than getting through sex with her eyes closed and her hands to herself, a girl who finds her lover's whole body beautiful. I am not that brave girl. Not yet. But each time I apply Cherries in the Snow, I have hope…

‘It's a
great
red,' I reply. Holly stares at me, at my mouth, but says nothing. I feel like I am waiting for a queen to announce whether I'm getting leniency or the guillotine. Finally she speaks: ‘I get it.'

Relief. Suspicion. ‘What do you mean?'

She puts her arm around me. We are the same height in the mirror, give or take an inch. She sees this and straightens up, taking the inch. ‘We need our Cherries in the Snow.'

‘Really?' She doesn't know what this means to me.

‘Look, our company, the ugly, edgy makeup, is cute and all, but we need something that will last, live past us. Honey, I plan to die young. I want to know that there're dream-filled sluts out there using my products long after these skinny bones are gone …'

I never would have described her as skinny. Compact is better. The pun is not intended. Rather destiny has entwined her body type and her career.

‘Our company's been going for five years. We've got our core audience, I know, but these girls are going to grow up eventually, find out that, actually, edgy is all very well, but what they really want is to be beautiful. One product, one name. That's what will do it. The product doesn't really matter. But the name …'

‘That's my job, huh?'

She nods, kisses me on the forehead, and walks out. I look in the mirror. She has a nasty habit of stamping me with her scarlet seal of approval. Great. It will not budge. I brush my bangs over my eyes. But I am too overwhelmed to be pissed at her.

At lunch, Holly goes out and buys some cherries and we place them in the snow on our windowsill, then stand back and watch, as though they are about to do something. They do look wonderful.

‘I hope I look like that when I'm stretched out on my white sheets with a man.' I sigh.

That's what we're doing when we hear a cough and turn around to see a guy carrying a brown paper bag. It is the handsome yogi I met in the bodega the month before. I recognize him immediately even without the carton of soy milk in his hand. Brown eyes fringed with long lashes, close-cropped black hair, mocha skin. I can't quite place his ethnicity: skin too dark for a European Jew. Sephardic maybe? Like my dad. Away from the harsh bodega lighting, he looks ten times handsomer than I remember him. His body is different. Maybe it was like that before, ripped dancer's abs and other words I remember from my time at the gym but never gave a shit about until they were standing before me, Springsteen-ian with lack of effort.

The cherries glow behind him, a chorus of approval, they lift themselves from the snowy windowsill and dance around his head, forming a heart shape that encircles his close-cropped skull like a halo. A 3-D painting of a saint. Saint cheekbones of the doe eyes. I sigh. There is a gentleness to his features that makes me feel calm.

‘Oh, my fucking Christ!' shrieks Holly, breaking my calm, and leaps into his arms, wrapping her naked legs around him and causing the cherry heart formation to crash to the floor. Ivy stares from Holly to him, her ears visibly pricking up. And out. She looks like Spock.

‘What's up, my favorite dyke?' He has a soft voice, like an animal trainer's. Or from the way Holly clings to him, pretzel-style, a lesbian trainer's. Holly unravels herself and he places her neatly back on the same ground above which I feel myself hover. ‘This, girls, is my old friend Steven Marley.'

‘Oh, wow,' says Ivy. ‘Hi, I've heard so much about you. I can't believe it's you.' What looks like it might be a blush of
jealousy on her cheeks subtly morphs into a blush of confusion. My objectifying turns a shade of intrigue. Who the hell is Steven Marley?

‘Your work,' adds Ivy, ‘is amazing.'

‘Thank you,' he answers. ‘You must be Ivy. I've heard so much about you. You're the better half.' With a single sentence he soothes the inflammation eating at Ivy's soul, and she smiles shyly as she shakes his hand. She seems small next to him, an accidental and additional kindness on his part. For all her ballyhooing about reclaiming the word
fat
, I see how much she enjoys the tininess of her hand in his.

Having delighted Holly and Ivy, he turns his attention to Vicki. What, am I invisible? Am I only cute by the light of the bodega? I wait for the bowling ball of charm to knock out Vicki and she's waiting too, her mouth twisted into a truly terrifying grin, gummy and wet.

‘Hi.' He nods briefly, giving her just enough time to say ‘Hi, I'm Vi,' and then he turns straight to me.

‘Hey.' Vicki blinks, fluttering her lashes. But he doesn't stop looking at me. He stares so hard I start to wonder if I too have dancing fruit behind my head. He has the same confused look that Sidney Katz gets when I have to blow-dry him after his biannual bath.

‘We've met before, no? In the deli? I was on my way home from yoga. You said you'd call and you never did.'

You say deli, I say bodega. Oh, it would never work out between us.

‘You didn't call him?' says Vicki out loud, then realizes she said it out loud and skulks to her desk in shame. We have covered a spectrum of reds – exuberance, jealousy, shame – and this guy has only been in the office three minutes. Except he isn't really a guy. He is, quite indisputably, a man.